Tag: Boy scouts

I was an indifferent student and failed to pass the Board Examinations for the School Leaving Certificate in the first attempt and had to take the supplementary examinations to pass them later.

I was however an avid Boy Scout and Cadet of the Naval Wing of the National Cadet Corps. These two programmes taught me a great deal of discipline, team spirit and patriotism that prepared me for the real world. Frankly speaking, apart from these two activities I cannot think of any that helped me later.

If however Business School is also included in the title, then I would say, yes it certainly did to the extent of getting me a Management Trainee’s position in a great company. Here too, what I learned as a trainee and junior Manager in the firm helped me a great deal later in my life than the theoretical knowledge that I had picked up in the Business School.

What both these institutions taught me however was how to learn. That prepared me for the real world as it does even today. This is why I maintain that education is learning to learn.

Shackman picked this week’s topic and so I will choose next week’s. Be sure to check Shackman’s take on this week’s topic.

A mysterious topic for the LBC from Lin which will be solved when I get to read her post eventually. I am unusually late in posting this because I had been preoccupied with a number of domestic chores besides being saddled for most of the day with a very slow internet connection. I am now relatively free from chores and the internet speed is back up to par and so let me finish this very pleasant task before it becomes Saturday.

Let me first tackle the park. In my life there is a park that plays a very significant role in my social activities as well giving me a place to go for my constitutionals. This park was originally developed into what it promised to be and became by considerable social work by the citizens committee of our neighbourhood. All of us put in a lot of labour clearing brush and developing the gardens while also planting many trees in what was originally fallow farm land.

Our Residents Association is still very active in seeing that the park is maintained properly by the Municipal Authorities by proper liaisoning and even voluntary work when needed. Naturally we are all very proud of the park which has been nominated as the best park in our city.

Now coming to George, my first George was Chennai’s Fort St. George. As a young Boy Scout and subsequently as a Cadet of the National Cadet Corps, there were many visits that we were made to undertake to this great landmark of the city. It gave me great pleasure to take my son and daughter in law a couple of years ago to show them this too.

The next George in my life came when I was admitted for a few months to The St. George’s Grammar School, Hyderabad where I learnt a motto which has inspired me ever since – “Perseverantia Omnia Vincit!” (Perseverance Conquers All Things!)

And there was my classmate for two years in Business School who continues to be a good friend even after half a century, P M George who I affectionately called the Post Master General because of his initials.

When George visited me in Pune, I was recovering from a surgery and was unable to show off our park which is something that I do with all visitors from out of town.

I hope that Lin finds my take on the topic as interesting as I am very likely to find hers.

Ps. After writing this post it was brought to my notice that there is a Musical of the same title. I am sure that Lin is likely to write on that but even had I known about it before I wrote my post, I would have still approached the topic the same way as I did.

Perhaps that should read as “Because two computers are better than one.” The internet has made it possible for us to have more pen pals than one would have thought possible when pen pals were all the rage. I had one brush with that phenomenon.

I was all of 13 years old when my cousin Mangala who was the librarian at the United States Information Service Library in Madras put me in touch with a young lad of the same age from the USA named Johny Horrigan Jr. The USIS had a program to encourage such exchanges and Johny and I exchanged a few letters and photographs taken with our box cameras, during the next two years and both simply tapered off due to other preoccupations. We had Boy Scouts as the only common interest and there was the dampener that I did not have a clue about base ball and he about cricket!

After that great experience, all my penning was to people I knew and I was an inveterate writer of letters. I wrote to my friends, cousins, mother and a few times to the editor of the local news papers too. But I never got back to making pen pals till the advent of the internet.

I don’t know if I can call my internet friends who I have not met face to face as pen pals but it makes sense to me to. I don’t put a pen to paper to write to them, but type on a key board I do to correspond with them through emails, facebook, blog posts and comments; and now with the world becoming smaller on skype, whatsap, sms and so on too.

If I am allowed to include my internet friends, then my list of pen pals would run into a very large number and one of these days, I shall sit down and count and give this post an update. In the meanwhile, I am glad that I have them in my life and I hope that they are happy that I am in their life too.

I hope that you enjoyed reading this post on the weekly Friday Loose Bloggers Consortium where six of us write on the same topic. Today’s topic was chosen by yours truly. The five other bloggers who write regularly are, in alphabetical order, gaelikaa, Maxi, Paul, Shackman, and The Old Fossil. Do drop in on their blogs and see what their take is on this week’s topic. Since some of them may post late, do give some allowance for that too!